What took you so long, Mr Howard?

The destruction of ATSIC has always been on this Prime Minister's agenda, writes Greg Barns.

On the face of it, John Howard's decision to abolish ATSIC may look like a case of putting an underfunded and dysfunctional organisation out of its misery. However, there is a bigger picture that involves pragmatic politics and Howard's eye on his own history.

By personally announcing the ATSIC decision, Howard is seeking to reconnect with those voters who deserted Paul Keating's "Mabo, Asia and republic" agenda in the 1996 election - the group of voters once known as Howard's battlers.

Howard has wanted to axe the idea of any form of indigenous sovereignty since at least 1995. For him, ATSIC was simply a manifestation of an undesirable tendency that was evident during Paul Keating's prime ministership - a tendency Howard feared was undermining Australia's cohesiveness.

When Howard was elected to office in 1996 he was determined to end what he saw as a division between taxpayer-funded special interests and privileged groups on the one hand and the disempowered mainstream voter on the other.

In June 1995, Howard set out this view of Keating's Australia in what he termed a headland speech. He said there "is a frustrated mainstream in Australia today which sees government decisions increasingly driven by the noisy, self-interested clamour of powerful vested interests with scant regard for the national interest. Many Australians in the mainstream feel utterly powerless to compete with such groups, who seem to have the ear completely of the government on major issues."

Howard's solution was to ensure that under a Coalition government, Aboriginal, multicultural and even artistic policies would be "assessed against the national interest and the sentiments of mainstream Australia".

Fast forward to Thursday's ATSIC announcement and you will find the Prime Minister has been true to his words of a decade ago. He claims the national interest has not been served by "the experiment in elected representation for indigenous people". He wants to "mainstream" ATSIC programs and believes that ATSIC "has become too preoccupied with what might loosely be called symbolic issues and too little concerned with delivering real outcomes for indigenous people".

This justification for abolishing ATSIC is probably also designed by Howard to reconnect him with the battlers who deserted the Keating Labor Party en masse in 1996 and who stuck with Howard when he acted tough on asylum seekers in the 2001 election.

Many of these same voters supported the sentiments of Pauline Hanson when she was on the national political stage. This helps explain why Howard failed to oppose Hanson when she said in her maiden speech in Parliament in 1996 that "a type of reverse racism is applied to mainstream Australians by those who promote political correctness and those who control the various taxpayer-funded 'industries' that flourish in our society servicing Aboriginals, multiculturalists and a host of other minority groups". No doubt Hanson will be applauding Howard's abolition of ATSIC!

The drama of Tampa and children-overboard delivered the battlers to the Liberals in 2001. But against the background of a resurgent ALP, will the abolition of ATSIC similarly drive up the Liberals' vote?

The anger and resentment about taxpayer-funded interest groups and alleged acts of reverse racism that fuelled Howard and Hanson's popularity after the 1996 election seems to have dissipated somewhat. In part, perhaps, because Mark Latham's Labor Party is also a conservative beast and had promised to abolish ATSIC.

ATSIC itself, despite the high ideals that underpinned it, has been mired in controversy in recent years. The reconciliation movement, after reaching a high point in 2000 with its hugely successful nationwide marches, seems to have lost momentum.

And most importantly, Howard's battlers are now putting health and education at the top of their list of vote-changing issues.

Of course, for Howard, it's never just about votes. This is a Prime Minister with a firm eye on how history will judge his actions against his philosophical outlook and agenda.

Keating championed indigenous self-determination, native title and reconciliation and viewed them as historical turning points for Australia. Howard has always been equally determined to ensure they were not.

The abolition of ATSIC and the death of indigenous self-determination, along with Howard's earlier decisions to refuse a formal apology and compensation for the stolen generation, are examples of his obsession with striking down "rights based" politics.

The wonder is that Howard didn't abolish ATSIC earlier.

Greg Barns is the author of What's wrong with the Liberal Party? (Cambridge, 2003) and a member of the Australian Democrats.